SECRET SHRINES BY LOST LAGOONS
Of course I picked the coldest night we have yet had to sleep on deck.
The swinging berth is too narrow to turn over in without a process
which requires as much care as the insertion of the last sardine in a
can. This means that I must wake up each time I turn over. Furthermore
the kapok mattress is so thin that I feel the board through it, and
it is so short that I lop over each end of it. On his ample pneumatic
mattress McClurg sleeps like a tired babe, while I turn and twist,
bumping my head on the deck timbers above and chafing my nose against
the supporting chain.
To aggravate the usual difficulties of sleeping last night my head
was full of visions of Camera’s promised temples of Tabi. And my body
burned with the bites of ticks.
People react differently to insects. I know a man who pursues a
wintry climate all the year around because a mosquito is as poisonous
to him as a viper. But the consensus of opinion among men of normal
zoölogical reactions and wide experience among bugs is that the
mosquito and the flea are charming epidermal tenants by comparison with
the Yucatan tick, and his small cousin, the red-bug.
It is not so much that the tick imbeds his head and the red-bug most
of his person in your hide, if you let him. For you do not let him. A
careful coöperative tick inspection at least three times a day will
prevent such burrowing, and this rite is scrupulously observed in every
well ordered expedition. But inspect as often as you like and the tick
still finds opportunities to bite you. Apparently even when given the
freedom of the premises the average tick like the cautious oil operator
will sample the surface in a dozen places before spudding in. And each
one of the spots thus tentatively punctured is good for a week or ten
days of itching and burning.
Men have different religions and different tick lotions. Pity one who
has found no comfort in the orthodox varieties of either! The way to
avoid dying is to avoid being born. The way to avoid tick bites is to
stay out of tick country.
High boots with trousers tucked well into them are frequently
recommended to novices. But beware, this device merely drives the tick
upward to the more vital regions. And the tick has not yet been born
who cannot get in over belt, collar band or through button holes. And
of course, if you want him in your ears....
No, the natives who go barefoot have the least trouble. Inspection of
bare ankles is easier than inspection of muffled waist line. And after
a while the ankle becomes protected by a layer of flesh corrugated and
mostly numb.
Cures for the itching are as difficult to find as preventatives of the
biting. The ten per cent sugar of lead in pure glycerine recommended
to me by George Laird, of the Chicle Development Company, is the best
palliative of the pain I have ever found in a bottle. The best one of
all, though, is an application of ice. A portable pocket ice plant
would make the inventor’s fortune.
Lacking ice the sufferer may immerse himself in the coolest water
available. But we can do that only by risking mandibles which might end
the suffering by ending the sufferer. Yet when one has twenty or thirty
raw red tick bites nicely bunched one is sometimes tempted to invite a
barracuda to tear out that whole offending section of one’s anatomy.
Seeking relief in coolness I went on deck about one o’clock.
But the cure was not much better than the disease. Soon my teeth were
chattering and for every tick bite I had a hundred goose pimples.
The next three hours were an alternation of tortures. Either I was
dangerously chilly, or comfortably warm and tortured by tick bites. For
the moment one’s skin reaches a normal warmth the bites burn with a
heavy agony like flesh that is roasting.
At last, with exhaustion, came sleep. But after an hour of that I was
aroused by the touch of cold rain. I pulled over me a pup tent which
serves me as a waterproof blanket, and I tucked its edges under the
mattress on the deck in order to keep my foundation dry.
Confident that I was safe from the elements I dozed off, only to awake
again with a sensation of unpleasant dampness beneath me. Water had
come up through the mattress, which was now a saturated sponge.
The night was thinning anyway, so reluctantly I stood erect. The
resultant noise was like an elephant wrecking a tent under a waterfall.
It reminded me of the tumult of a Chautauqua tent which once fell on
me in the middle of a cloudburst. Several quarts of water which had
collected in the valleys of the collapsed pup tent sloshed to the deck
in cascades.
[Illustration: Back view of round Paalmul “observatory.” Priests were
the astronomers of the Mayas, who saw no conflict between religion and
science]
As the ultimate frustration of the struggles of that agonizing night
this was somehow immensely and overwhelmingly funny. Griscom, who had
patiently borne my night-long efforts to achieve quiet repose, laughed
and laughed till the tears rolled down his face and the whole schooner
was awake.
After a long morning of photographing and measuring twelve buildings at
Paalmul we persuaded Anaclito Oc to ship with us for the four mile run
to Chakalal.
There is greediness behind the haste with which we dash from one group
of ruins to another. We are not forgetting that several previous
expeditions were prevented by the weather from discovering the
buildings which we are studying. Always in our minds is the rumor that
Gann is coming down this way in a schooner. We are like men in a gold
rush, trying to stake out as many claims as possible before all work is
stopped by the blizzards of Alaskan winter.
After the wind had driven us from Xkaret by shifting to the east it
obligingly backed into the north again and has held there. Of course
the scope of our expedition is purely explorative, anyway, but we are
hurrying down this particular segment of coast faster than we should
were not our work dependent on the continuance of an offshore wind.
Once we have “staked our claims,” that is, discovered as many new
sites as possible, we can return for more intensive study. If weather
does not permit returning by sea we may revisit these places by land
another season. Now that the profits of chicle gathering are bringing
the Indians to a peaceful frame of mind towards foreigners it will be
quite feasible to leave the railhead at Valladolid in the State of
Yucatan and strike through the bush to this coast.
A beach inhabited by a species of sea snail which provided our soup for
two days marked the spot to land at Chakalal. Oc had worked here three
or four years previously with a gang of _chicleros_. He thought he
could find a trail they had cut, passing a Maya temple. He plunged into
the bush to look for it, leaving Spinden and me on the beach. In half
an hour he emerged, unsuccessful. He went in again, and after nearly
an hour we heard his whoops, half muffled by the thick brush. He burst
out of the jungle at almost the very spot where he had first sought the
trail. There it was, said he, but so overgrown that Spinden and I had
no evidence of it but Oc’s word.
There was less than an hour of daylight left when we forsook the bright
beach for the dull bush. We advanced in single file, all hacking at
trees in mid stride to mark the route back. The sun had set when we
reached the temple, something over a mile from the beach, we judged.
We lingered hardly a second, merely snatching sprigs of vanilla, with
which the temple was covered. Before we had gone a third of the way
back the woods were dark, and a night monkey was howling. But our
blazes gleamed faintly on _chaca_ and _zapote_ trees, and the guide had
the trail instinct of a homeward bound mule.
In the morning we returned to it, found another temple within a quarter
of a mile of it and a mound where a third building had dissolved close
beside the first. The frequency with which one finds mounds with hardly
a stone standing beside buildings almost intact is partly due to a
varying solidity of construction, perhaps, but it is chiefly the result
of a difference in age. Some sites were occupied continuously for
several hundreds of years during which new structures were springing
up more or less continually. Others, like Chichen Itza, were abandoned
only to be re-occupied.
These two buildings, overshadowed by some of the largest trees we
have yet encountered in this land of scrubby vegetation, are very
good representatives of a type of structure peculiar to East Coast
architecture. These are single-room temples, rather small, yet too
large to be given the technical term “shrine,” which archæologists
are coming to restrict to the small sanctuaries like the one at
Chenchomac--over which larger buildings are often erected, as already
explained. Like most Maya buildings and practically all of the East
Coast temples these are raised on a substructure of stone and earth.
Sometimes, as in the case of the temples of Tikal, this substructure
is over a hundred feet high. With the smaller east coast temple like
these two I am discussing it is a mere platform or terrace from one
to three feet above the ground. One might suppose it was a desire to
break the monotonous flatness of Yucatan’s scenery which led the Mayas
to adopt this custom of raising their buildings, but even in the hills
of Guatemala they did it. Perhaps a desire to escape the waters of the
rainy season had something to do with it.
The walls of these temples, like others of their type, are about two
feet thick. The lintel over the door is set in, and nearly always has
traces of paint. Against the back wall, facing the door, is an altar
made of mortar, raised a foot or two above the floor and three or four
feet square. Buildings of this type often have flat roofs, in which the
stucco is partly supported by beams of the _zapote_ tree, so enduring
that we have found many of them still sound. In other cases these
buildings have the vaulted ceilings characteristic of most buildings
of pure Maya architecture. A flat roof is always suggestive of the
influence of the Toltecs who overran Yucatan in the thirteenth century.
[Illustration: This building on the harbor of Chakalal contains murals
of a style never found before in East-Coast art. A subterranean river
of fresh water enters the salt lagoon at each side of the temple]
Two cornices, at least, break the surfaces of exterior walls, but
sometimes there are three or even four projecting ridges of stone.
Needless to say the material of all Maya buildings is the limestone
which forms the foundation of the whole peninsula, which is very young,
geologically speaking. The Indians burned this stone to get lime,
crushed it to make a rubble for the cores of walls, etc., and cut it to
make solid building blocks.
In one of these temples we found an incense burner, of a sandy sort of
ware. Maya pottery was shaped by hand generally, although sometimes a
block turned by the foot was held under the utensil during formation.
In a similar temple on a half hidden lagoon north of our anchorage we
found much greater treasure. Gough came upon this temple while looking
for fish. They swarm over the bright sandy floor of the bay, especially
fish about two feet long of a luscious dark blue. This little bay is
perhaps four hundred yards long and two hundred yards wide, except
at its narrow entrance, for it is shaped like a sack or an oriole’s
nest. On the north side there is an offsetting, smaller bay where we
saw an empty turtle crawl, that is a pen of stakes driven into the
bottom through shallow water. Here the sea tortoises are kept until the
fishermen are ready to kill them for their shell or meat.
The temple--which has conical stone decorations about a foot high on
its roof, stands at the very head of the lagoon, which terminates in
an abrupt wall of jagged limestone. From under this wall or cliff come
bubbling out two subterranean rivers of fresh water. One of them runs
on the surface a few yards through a small chasm in the rock before
it reaches the lagoon, but the mouth of the other under the rock can
be detected only by the sight of the fresh water boiling up through
the salt. McClurg cast back through the bush looking for further
outcroppings of these rivers but could find none. It is the nature of
limestone to break into pockets and hidden chasms and Yucatan is full
of subterranean ponds, rivers and even lakes. Many of them were used by
the old Mayas for their supply of drinking water, and some are reached
through tortuous, descending caves.
Spinden entered the temple first and I knew he had found something
good by his grunt of satisfaction. The treasure was nothing less than
several wall paintings. We have already found many traces of this
sort of decoration, but these murals in the little temple on this lost
lagoon which once was doubtless crowded with great canoes are very well
preserved. There is a jaguar and a feathered serpent in two shades of
green, and several imprints of the curious red hand.
More than anything we have found these paintings gave me a creepy
feeling of the nearness of the ancient builders, as if in a dark corner
of this temple I had glimpsed a be-feathered priest at his occult
rites. The sight of these beast divinities, which the Mayas endowed
with half human attributes, seemed to increase the poignancy of the
riddle which has baffled investigation. If only these walls could speak!
The Mayas, like the Greeks, made much use of color, sometimes a whole
building being painted one tint. Mural paintings are not uncommon, and
from them alone has been learned much of what we know about the old
astronomers. The red hand, a very common symbol, has been something
of a puzzle. The suggestion has been made that it signifies strength,
power and mastery, and that it is the sign of some secret brotherhood.
There is reason to believe that some of the impressions of this sign
were put in Maya buildings after the conquest, in short, that here is a
tangible piece of the old ritual remembered by degenerate descendants
of great ancestors.
Sometimes the impression was made by placing the human hand against a
surface and painting around it and between the fingers. In other cases
the red paint was daubed over the hand of the artist and that slapped
against a wall.
Jaguars were favorite subjects of Maya artists, and the Rain Gods of
the Four Quarters were given the forms of jaguars in Maya religion. The
Gods of the Mayas were many and included planets and forces of nature
as well as animals endowed with human or superhuman intelligence. In
addition there seems to have been a belief in a formless supreme being.
Of the gods commonly portrayed in painting and sculpture the jaguar was
second in importance only to the plumed serpent, Kukulcan. This serpent
of ours has no plume but he does have a bird’s foot with open claws at
the extremity of a sort of dragon’s leg attached to his body. This foot
is held angrily below his gaping jaws, which would not be recognized as
a snake’s jaws by a person unfamiliar with Maya art, which followed a
course of conventionalization that took it to the opposite pole of such
realistic portrayal as is now all the rage in the literature of the
United States.
[Illustration: Wall paintings, which were in two shades of green,
found in a temple at Chakalal. Above, a sacred jaguar; below a sacred
serpent, probably Kukulcan, the feathered snake. Instead of feathers
this one has a bird’s foot held below the open jaws, which would be
recognized as jaws only by a person familiar with Maya art in its
conventionalized forms.]
The most important feature of these paintings is that they are in
a style quite different from anything heretofore found in old Maya
settlements along the Caribbean Sea. They do not at all resemble
the wall paintings at Tulum, or at Santa Rita, in British Honduras.
The nearest things to them in artistic treatment are certain
representations found in the Tro-Cortesianus _Codex_, one of the
three old Maya books which fortune preserved from the destructive
bigotry of the Spaniards. This _Codex_ is assigned by authorities to
northern Yucatan, and to a date not later than the beginning of the
13th century. There is no evidence of Nahua or Toltec influence in
the Tro-Cortesianus _Codex_, an influence we are growing tired of
observing, for we have found it in many of the buildings along this
coast. Toltec art is inferior to Maya art, and the explorer is always
pleased to find remnants of the pure Maya culture.
There are many signs that this temple is being used by modern Indians.
A trail debouches near it. A fresh beam with the bark still moist had
been put across the western end of the temple to hold up the sagging
walls. There were palmetto leaves on the floor where someone had made
a bed, and there were fresh ashes before the altar. On this was the
dried skin of a rattlesnake, and another lay nearby. Gough suggested
that these had been put here by natives as part of modern rites to the
sacred serpent. We take little stock in this suggestion, for snakes
which are about to shed their skins like the darkness of temples, and
use the rough stones as an aid in the process of undressing. It is
interesting that although we have found several snake skins before
these we have not yet seen a live ophidian. We are quite content to
have it this way.
There is certainly a dramatic fitness in the sight of these skins lying
beneath the painted Serpent God. Did these rattlesnakes recognize
their mythological ancestor? What a part the serpent has played in the
imaginations of primitive man!
As Spinden says, “The unique character of Maya art comes from the
treatment of the serpent. Indeed, the trail of the serpent is over all
the civilizations of Central America and southern Mexico.”
Similarities in conventionalized art are more significant than those
in realistic art, so the advocates of the theory that the Mayas
are descended from the Egyptians make much of the fact that the
conventionalized feathered serpents of Yucatan are matched by winged
serpents found in the Egyptian pantheon.
However, the sinuous serpent body lent itself readily to artistic
representation the world over. It is only natural that under similar
circumstances human minds should react similarly, whether in Burma or
in Guatemala. Old World artists never thought of the serpent in the
spiritual terms of the Maya. They never put human heads and hands in
the mouths of their sculptured snakes.
* * * * *
The itch to find as much as possible before a shift in wind should
cover the coast with surf and make landings dangerous or impossible
drove us from Chakalal at sunrise. Forty-five minutes later our
thermometer registered sixty-seven degrees Fahrenheit in the shade.
Brrrr, that is cold.
Anaclito Oc had already been sent back to Paalmul in the _Imp_, with a
reward for his services big enough to raise the price of all ruins to
us if other natives hear of it.
After a four-mile run before the boisterous wind which enabled us to
save fuel we sighted another of the characteristic outpost temples.
Spinden says they remind him of signposts marked, “Here Is A City.”
We went ashore to investigate. In the rear of the flat-roofed building
was an altar, with traces of recently burned copal incense. Leaning
against the back wall of the building, their bases in these ashes,
were two small crosses of planed wood. While Spinden was measuring the
building I took these crosses outside and photographed them. I had just
finished when I saw an Indian coming along the beach of the lagoon
behind the small promontory on which this temple stands. I dashed
inside and restored the crosses to their places on the altar.
Again and again we have reached a ruin only to have an Indian appear as
if by magic and keep a close eye on us until we had finished our work.
It is becoming very evident that the Indians regard these temples of
_Los Antiguos_ with a certain reverence and that to a large extent they
still resent foreign intrusion. This is very significant. Bear in mind
that science has never been sure of the relation between modern natives
and those who built the tall cities of white limestone.
That the Indians still use the old temples for worship there can be no
doubt. But it is quite another thing to say that they have definite
traditions of the great past which they could give up if they would.
Alas, it is all too possible that the very natives who mix the symbols
of Roman Catholicism and the ancient religion of Mayapan understand the
true significance of neither cross nor copal.
[Illustration: The laborers who built the stone temples probably lived
in huts like these of the modern Indians of Acomal]
Gough and Whiting, who were on the beach, engaged this Indian in
conversation till we descended from the steep promontory. He said he
was General José Puk (pronounced Pook), Chief of the Indians of Acomal.
It was his people who had told the Morley-Lothrop party of ruins
near their village. The locality of this temple where we found the
crosses is called Ak, said the General, which means _Turtle_. It has a
good canoe harbor and is a sort of suburb of the ruined town of Acomal.
The General said the best way to reach those ruins was to go down the
coast two miles to the modern village of Acomal and then strike inland.
So he came aboard with us.
At the sight of another Indian General boarding the schooner McClurg
threw up his hands. Puk is indeed a picturesque _hombre_. At this
moment he was wearing an English cloth cap with the visor turned
backwards, a red neckerchief and a green flannel shirt. From lanyards
over his shoulders which crossed on his chest were suspended a catskin
pouch and a _machete_. With the exception of the sandals on his feet he
wore nothing below the waist except a pair of B. V. D. drawers. He has
sideburns and moustache, but they are so sparse that they don’t show
unless they catch the light just right. With aquiline nose, strong chin
and fine, frank, manly expression he is altogether the most attractive
Indian we have yet met. When we reached his village he changed his cap
to a six gallon felt hat with a picture of a _houri_ on a beer tag
stuck in the band.
We presented his children with dolls, rubber balls and jack-knives,
and his wife with a bottle of perfume. The General promptly
appropriated this, so we gave the poor woman another. Thereupon the
General took that, too. I remembered we had a bolt of colored calico on
the schooner and sent Nelson after it for the woman, but I am not sure
the General has not had it made into drawers.
Anyway he earned his presents. In the morning he took Spinden, Whiting
and me to a pair of temples much like those at Chakalal except that one
has human heads in stucco on the exterior front wall, one at each side
of the door. The other has before it on an outdoor altar a piece of
stucco shaped like a pineapple and about two feet high. Similar objects
have been found elsewhere in the Maya area, but their purpose has never
been determined except that it was obviously a ritualistic one.
Insect life was plentiful at Acomal, and we stopped every few minutes
for tick inspection.
Simultaneously Whiting and I began to feel chilly and feverish, with
aching backs and legs. Therefore we did not accompany Puk in the
afternoon when he took Spinden to four more temples. But McClurg
and I ran the _Imp_ into a lagoon about half way between Acomal and
Ak, where Puk said we could find a ruin. It turned out to be one of
those interesting combinations of a larger building built over and
completely enclosing a smaller one.
Lothrop calls this peculiar East Coast double building a palace,
arguing that the interior arrangement indicates that the larger rooms
were used for residence and that the smaller building against the
back wall of the chief structure is a sort of private sanctuary. One
reason which he cites for his conclusion is “the fact that no other
structures exist suitable for residence” among East Coast sites. He is
evidently thinking of the fact that in other parts of the Maya area
there are buildings of many rooms which seem to have been well suited
for the residence of priests and other dignitaries. Two such buildings,
which may easily be seen by any tourist to Yucatan, are the high bulky
“Nunnery” of Chichen Itza and the long, ornate “House of the Governor”
at Uxmal. Lothrop’s argument does not seem overpowering to me, for
it is quite possible that all the stone buildings which still stand
in damaged form were used for administrative and ceremonial purposes
alone, and that the Maya rulers, like the artisans who slaved for them,
lived in dwellings of wood which have long since vanished. If our own
people should be wiped out by some great catastrophe and our cities
abandoned the archæologist a thousand years hence among the stones
of New York might find the Public Library and the Woolworth Building
conspicuous among the structures not entirely destroyed. But he would
not be safe in arguing that because they had been divided into many
rooms they had been used for residential purposes.
However, Lothrop’s suggestion about the East Coast “palace” is
interesting, particularly when he says that “The presence of the
sanctuary shows that even in his home the Maya noble was unable to
escape the all-pervading influence of religion.”
For mark you, all these buildings which we have been finding were of
some religious significance. This is true of the mysterious round
building at Paalmul even if that was an observatory. For in that case
it was an observatory manned by priests, priests who believed that
the Supreme Being had given them their faculties to use, and that
obedience to the impulses of curiosity would never be resented by God.
It is difficult to name another race in which the religious emotion so
dominated the high artistic expression of a whole people, or worked to
produce so ardent a search for the secrets of the universe.
* * * * *
All good things end at last and this north wind faded last night
(Friday) and gave way to a ripping breeze which came from a point a
little south of east. At eight bells in the evening Gough snatched
up his anchor and stood offshore. He lay off and on all night, not
attempting to make much headway and not troubling to hang a light in
the rigging. It is a deserted coast. We have not sighted even a canoe
off the beaches since we left Cozumel on Monday.
What a different picture it must have made seven hundred years ago!
Xkaret, Paalmul, Chakalal, Ak and Acomal are as close together as towns
on the Connecticut shore between New York and New Haven.
Of course, conventionalized art is apt to spring from a later stage of
culture development than realistic art. But the Mayas continued some
use of realistic sculpture up to the time of their downfall, and the
realistic heads affixed to temple exteriors which we have been finding
does not mean that these old seaports date back to the first period
of Maya history. Indeed, they are unmistakably of the last period,
which ran from about 1200 A.D. to the arrival of the Spaniards. And
if decadent peoples sometimes revert to primitive art forms these
imitative sculptures may lend one more support to the contention that
the Maya civilization had run far downhill when the Spaniards found it;
a contention which all the other evidence nearly lifts to the dignity
of a fact.
We believe that probably the “three large towns” seen by Juan Diaz in
1517 were among the five sites which we have just finished exploring.
Daybreak found us wallowing in a short green chop. Under our lee
was the crumbling temple and high mound which probably gave Paalmul
(“Broken Pyramid”) its name.
A short distance north of Xkaret we saw the thatched houses of Playa
Carmen. In spite of the on-shore wind we managed to land in the _Imp_,
which is an excellent surf boat, particularly since Gough covered her
tender bottom with a layer of canvas at Cozumel. There are several
ruins here which were discovered by the Carnegie Institution Expedition
of 1918. Spinden put his tape on two buildings which that expedition
did not have time to measure. One of them has been used by the Indians
for drying tobacco.
We were surprised to find in this town of eight huts and forty-eight
people a school. It was opened by the Mexican Government a few years
ago and has nine pupils. That the Calles régime should carry education
to such a tiny and inaccessible hamlet speaks well for the future of
Mexico. The sum of the world’s knowledge about the Mayas of old is
bound to be helped by carrying enlightenment to the poor handful of
Indians living in what was once perhaps the most thickly settled piece
of the globe.
I have sometimes been asked for an estimate of this ancient population
expressed in definite figures. It might be possible to work out an
estimate of maximum population per square mile, but it has never been
done. However, the figures must have been high, no other conclusion
is possible to one who sees the generosity with which pyramids,
raised platforms and walls built by human labor with stone tools were
scattered over the countryside.
Over our teacups at lunch I put a question on this point to Spinden. He
said:
“A factor which many people overlook in such a problem as this is that
there were in the Maya area no beasts of burden, and consequently
no use of agricultural food products except for human beings. In
the United States at present we use only one-fifth of our cereal
productions and the rest is given over to food and draft animals. The
Mayas, therefore, were able to get 100 per cent efficiency in human
labor out of the food which they raised, and since human beings were
necessary for the carrying and cutting of stone you can readily see
that the means of supporting a human population once existed, as well
as the need of such a population to explain such remains.”
We went on to Puerto Morelos, which we reached in early afternoon. This
place has a good harbor for boats of not more than ten or fifteen feet
of draft, and it has a sizable dock, a lighthouse and a narrow gauge
railroad running to chicle camps a few kilometers inland. Otherwise
its chief features are sand and an air of dismal decrepitude. We were
disappointed to hear that the ruins in the interior seem to have no
artistic features of any particular interest. And with Spinden seasick
again and Whiting and me full of chills and bone misery we decided to
run back to San Miguel de Cozumel, where we plan to leave Griscom to
finish his studies while we others look up the ruins mentioned by Ramon
Coronado.
Griscom has now established the existence of two hundred species of
birds on the mainland of Quintana Roo, of which few were definitely
known before. One of his last kills was a very rare pheasant cuckoo. A
week on Cozumel Island will finish his assignment from the Museum.
[Illustration: Temple found at Acomal with curious pineapple shaped
object on outdoor altar before it]
We are sorry to lose him, and McClurg too. For just before we sailed
from San Miguel the Commander got a cable which convinced his
conscience that his business needs his attention. But he never planned
to stay with us more than four or five weeks, and unless we visit
_Mugeres_ Island there will be no new coast for him to study. His work
is virtually finished, as well as Griscom’s, and he has never had the
slightest interest in the inland trip to Tabi which is now uppermost in
the minds of Spinden, Whiting and me. So he is taking a freight steamer
to Belize in two or three days and there catching the United Fruit boat
to New Orleans.
But sadness over the coming separation and the sickness of three of
us cannot keep down that warm feeling of triumph inside. The ancients
were right in assigning the seat of the emotions to the belly. When
I think of the discoveries we have made since Monday it is with a
distinct physical glow, which centers around the solar plexus. Five
sites of ruins in five successive days! We might wait here five years
for another five days of weather so favorable for landing on that
whip-sawed mainland coast. Mark you, the prevailing easterly winds of
winter did not matter so much to the canoes of the Mayas, for they,
like our dinghies, had shelter in the shoal harbors we have been
exploring. But there our schooner could not go to escape the wind and
sea, and the _Albert_ was a necessary base to our operations. It is of
our schooner we are thinking when we say that our success this past
week has been ninety-nine per cent the result of gorgeous luck.